Biweekly Pay Calculator

Biweekly means you get paid every 14 days, which works out to 26 paychecks a year because a year has just over 52 weeks. Semimonthly means twice a month on fixed dates (usually the 1st and 15th, or the 15th and last day), which is exactly 24 paychecks. So biweekly delivers 2 extra paychecks per year compared to semimonthly. The math also runs differently: a $52,000 salary is $2,000 per biweekly check (52000 / 26) but $2,166.67 per semimonthly check (52000 / 24).

Most months have 2 biweekly paychecks, but twice a year a month catches 3 because 26 paychecks do not divide evenly into 12 months. The exact months shift every calendar year and depend on the date of your first paycheck of the year. Those third checks are the easiest moment in the year to send a one-time payment to debt, an emergency fund, or an extra Roth IRA contribution, because no monthly bill is already attached to them.

Because biweekly is locked to a 14-day cycle, not the calendar. A year is 365.25 days, which is 26.07 fourteen-day periods, so US biweekly payroll runs on 26 paychecks per year (with a 27th paycheck occurring roughly once every 11 years on leap-year-aligned schedules). Semimonthly is a different schedule entirely (24 paychecks pinned to calendar dates). Dividing a $65,000 salary by 24 instead of 26 would overstate each biweekly check by about 8.3%, and you would run out of pay before year-end.

Multiply the hourly rate by hours per week, then by 2 (because each biweekly check covers two weeks). For a standard 40-hour week that is 80 hours per check. Example: $25/hour at 40 hours per week is 25 * 80 = $2,000 per biweekly paycheck, or $52,000 per year ($2,000 * 26). The calculator uses the 2080-hour full-time year convention (40 h/wk * 52 wk) to back-solve the hourly equivalent of a salary.

Federal withholding tables are published in IRS Publication 15-T with separate columns for biweekly versus semimonthly schedules, so per-check withholding is intentionally lower on biweekly (the IRS spreads the same annual tax across 26 checks instead of 24). FICA is flat: Social Security is 6.2% of wages up to the 2026 wage base of $184,500, Medicare is 1.45% with no cap, both withheld on every check. This calculator models the federal piece as a flat effective rate you provide, then divides total annual tax by 26 to estimate per-check net.